okay so there's an ad that's showed up on Slashdot a few times with a kind of neat glowing keychain but you need to enter your email address to even browse the site? It's like someone took pinterest and somehow made it even worse, you can't even look at a product page at all without making an account. Is it supposed to be like thinkgeek for people who don't already get enough spam? What even is their game plan here, I don't get it.
In step 3 (the advertising preferences thing), if you try to modify what it says your google profile is for advertising purposes, it asks you to create a google+ account for the privilege.
...new idea. If you already have the crazy tech necessary to do all that, just have your robots fabricate enclosed colony space instead. Mine, smelt, build roof. Yeah it's still ridiculous future technology, but if all you want is to make the place livable, it's a lot faster if you just make a bunch of buildings. Hell, in the amount of time it would take to crack all those atmospheric gases, you could have your crazy future robots just build an entire planet-covering roof for an enormous habitation space. It would take less work.
The article says it would last for a while if we could, so...back of the envelope with probably horribly wrong numbers. Martian atmospheric density at the surface is 0.020 kg/m^3, human survival limit is something like 0.6 kg/m^3, so we need to add 29x current martian atmosphere to be long-term human survivable without a mask (for children and older, babies would still need higher pressure). NASA puts current atmospheric mass at 2.5e16kg, so we need to add 7.25e17kg. If we wanted to accomplish that task over a thousand years, or roughly 3.15e10 seconds, we would need to produce about 2.30e7kg of atmosphere every second for the duration. (At that speed, the loss rate of Mars's atmosphere due to solar wind is absolutely negligible.)
Martian surface area is 1.44e14m^2, which means we'd need to pull ~5,000 kg of atmosphere out of every single square meter of the planet if we don't have some other source. I don't know what density or composition Martian rock is, but rock in general is about 2.5g/cm^3, or 2500kg/m^3. So you might need to dig several meters into the ground to get what you're after, and expend one hell of a lot of energy to crack the oxygen out of it, but it's not like you'd need to dig a whole mile down across the whole planet or anything.
There's a lot of different RPGs out there. Of course it depends on the group, but there's a lot of them that are designed to be less combat-y. The World of Darkness games (for all their flaws) often turn out that way, and sure they might be mostly the purview of whiny teenagers, but there's a lot of existential stuff and plotlines that focus on defining who you are and what your place in the universe is. Many of them outright punish you for killing people (without a very good reason) by tying immoral actions to some kind of sanity mechanic. And yeah, while settings like Vampire and Changeling: the Lost have plenty of characters who go around abusing their powers and murdering as they see fit, the PCs are usually the ones trying to reduce the amount of violence in the world, trying to make it more safe for art, philosophy and love. Even if they can't be a part of that world themselves and oh hey now we're back to the whiny teenager part. Also a big emphasis on telling a good story over "winning"; tragic failures are encouraged, which also means more introspection. In any case it's pretty common for an entire session to go by with no combat....and then there's Werewolf, but even in that straight-up power fantasy I swear people are twice as moral as your average "lawful good" D&D character. Seems like the setting is better at keeping people accountable for their actions. The bad guys may be irredeemable, but letting violence spill over into the mundane human world just helps the bad guys' cause. I think it's my favorite WoD setting, it's just a good balance overall, as long as you're willing to houserule stuff to simplify the dice-heavy combat.
I think it helps that D&D is one of actually very few tabletop RPGs that ties character progression to killing stuff. GMs that award experience points for advancing the plot instead of killing monsters tend to encourage way less violent games.
Well, there's a difference. CounterStrike puts you in a situation where killing is your only option. Choosing to play the game might be a moral decision, but it stops there. Tabletop RPGs put you in worlds where (depending on the GM) there may be many non-lethal solutions, and choosing to resort to violence above other choices is more morally meaningful while you're playing.
So the relatively new indie fad PC game Undertale makes some pretty interesting statements in this arena. It gives the player every chance to kill monsters along their path, but puts you in a world that is reasonably shocked and horrified if you actually do that. I've never seen a game so expertly make me feel guilty for resorting to violence instead of searching for another path, and it's pretty emotionally rewarding to finish a pacifist run. If you go the other way, it bends the fourth wall to explore the motivation behind a serial murderer.
Yeah, you nailed it, D&D the roleplaying game is about rolling your own stuff. This is something else that just happens to be in the setting, but isn't a roleplaying game and is designed for a different experience, one that doesn't focus on character development and which can be "won" in a night. Same with "Lords of Waterdeep", which is a more traditional competitive board game--in one of the main D&D settings--about building stuff, hiring heroes, and spending them to complete quests. It's fun in its own right.
Their abuse of copyright and trademark to screw over smaller developers is nothing short of legendary. It will be really nice to see them on a shorter leash. Even putting them under EA ownership would have been better than their CEO running wild; mobile development is a much safer place for indie devs with them bought out.
Maybe I'm too naive, but this doesn't sound like it's solving the problem of "too many emails", but instead the problem of "users need a keyboard to respond to emails efficiently". If I can't escape the office, at least it would be nice to get away from the desk.
I dunno, it's hardly false advertising to say "this policy isn't working for us, we're changing it going forward, but you can keep that extra storage for 12 months as compensation". Because that's what they're doing. Is it false advertising to ever change what plans you choose to offer?
Robots, or rather a human-driven learning program, can contribute facts to a shared database. Any robot based on this system can pull facts out of that database. Having "one robot teach another" seems like it implies that they don't share a database, and instead communicate information through some other way. This article is pretty neat because of its fact database, but not as cool as gorillas teaching each other sign language.
I mean, of course if your store is getting broken into a lot, you should buy better locks. Doesn't mean that if there's a crime spree and a rash of of robberies you shouldn't call on the government to investigate or patrol more.
Suppose this applies to humans the same as mice. How long do you think it takes for the effects of stress to show up in RNA, and how long does it take for it to be cleared? Of course there's there's some delay because of sperm production, but I didn't see any other info about the time required in that abstract. (Probably makes sense that it would be a study of its own.)
Depending on how rapid the onset and falloff are, it might be pretty reasonable to say "yeah, that was a pretty bad couple weeks, let's put off trying for kids for a month".
They don't even seem different from stresses on humans. Most of those are things that a significant part of first-world humanity deals with on a daily basis.
Slashdot Mirror
okay so there's an ad that's showed up on Slashdot a few times with a kind of neat glowing keychain but you need to enter your email address to even browse the site? It's like someone took pinterest and somehow made it even worse, you can't even look at a product page at all without making an account. Is it supposed to be like thinkgeek for people who don't already get enough spam? What even is their game plan here, I don't get it.
Probably very yes. That name just screams "this game is trash and we don't have any respect for our own creation".
In step 3 (the advertising preferences thing), if you try to modify what it says your google profile is for advertising purposes, it asks you to create a google+ account for the privilege.
...new idea. If you already have the crazy tech necessary to do all that, just have your robots fabricate enclosed colony space instead. Mine, smelt, build roof. Yeah it's still ridiculous future technology, but if all you want is to make the place livable, it's a lot faster if you just make a bunch of buildings. Hell, in the amount of time it would take to crack all those atmospheric gases, you could have your crazy future robots just build an entire planet-covering roof for an enormous habitation space. It would take less work.
The article says it would last for a while if we could, so...back of the envelope with probably horribly wrong numbers. Martian atmospheric density at the surface is 0.020 kg/m^3, human survival limit is something like 0.6 kg/m^3, so we need to add 29x current martian atmosphere to be long-term human survivable without a mask (for children and older, babies would still need higher pressure). NASA puts current atmospheric mass at 2.5e16kg, so we need to add 7.25e17kg. If we wanted to accomplish that task over a thousand years, or roughly 3.15e10 seconds, we would need to produce about 2.30e7kg of atmosphere every second for the duration. (At that speed, the loss rate of Mars's atmosphere due to solar wind is absolutely negligible.)
Martian surface area is 1.44e14m^2, which means we'd need to pull ~5,000 kg of atmosphere out of every single square meter of the planet if we don't have some other source. I don't know what density or composition Martian rock is, but rock in general is about 2.5g/cm^3, or 2500kg/m^3. So you might need to dig several meters into the ground to get what you're after, and expend one hell of a lot of energy to crack the oxygen out of it, but it's not like you'd need to dig a whole mile down across the whole planet or anything.
I think you've forgotten how multidisciplinary Slashdot is. Hell if I've ever seen that acronym before.
weird, Slashdot took out some of my line breaks but left others in.
There's a lot of different RPGs out there. Of course it depends on the group, but there's a lot of them that are designed to be less combat-y. The World of Darkness games (for all their flaws) often turn out that way, and sure they might be mostly the purview of whiny teenagers, but there's a lot of existential stuff and plotlines that focus on defining who you are and what your place in the universe is. Many of them outright punish you for killing people (without a very good reason) by tying immoral actions to some kind of sanity mechanic. And yeah, while settings like Vampire and Changeling: the Lost have plenty of characters who go around abusing their powers and murdering as they see fit, the PCs are usually the ones trying to reduce the amount of violence in the world, trying to make it more safe for art, philosophy and love. Even if they can't be a part of that world themselves and oh hey now we're back to the whiny teenager part. Also a big emphasis on telling a good story over "winning"; tragic failures are encouraged, which also means more introspection. In any case it's pretty common for an entire session to go by with no combat. ...and then there's Werewolf, but even in that straight-up power fantasy I swear people are twice as moral as your average "lawful good" D&D character. Seems like the setting is better at keeping people accountable for their actions. The bad guys may be irredeemable, but letting violence spill over into the mundane human world just helps the bad guys' cause. I think it's my favorite WoD setting, it's just a good balance overall, as long as you're willing to houserule stuff to simplify the dice-heavy combat.
I think it helps that D&D is one of actually very few tabletop RPGs that ties character progression to killing stuff. GMs that award experience points for advancing the plot instead of killing monsters tend to encourage way less violent games.
Well, there's a difference. CounterStrike puts you in a situation where killing is your only option. Choosing to play the game might be a moral decision, but it stops there. Tabletop RPGs put you in worlds where (depending on the GM) there may be many non-lethal solutions, and choosing to resort to violence above other choices is more morally meaningful while you're playing.
So the relatively new indie fad PC game Undertale makes some pretty interesting statements in this arena. It gives the player every chance to kill monsters along their path, but puts you in a world that is reasonably shocked and horrified if you actually do that. I've never seen a game so expertly make me feel guilty for resorting to violence instead of searching for another path, and it's pretty emotionally rewarding to finish a pacifist run. If you go the other way, it bends the fourth wall to explore the motivation behind a serial murderer.
Yeah, you nailed it, D&D the roleplaying game is about rolling your own stuff. This is something else that just happens to be in the setting, but isn't a roleplaying game and is designed for a different experience, one that doesn't focus on character development and which can be "won" in a night. Same with "Lords of Waterdeep", which is a more traditional competitive board game--in one of the main D&D settings--about building stuff, hiring heroes, and spending them to complete quests. It's fun in its own right.
Their abuse of copyright and trademark to screw over smaller developers is nothing short of legendary. It will be really nice to see them on a shorter leash. Even putting them under EA ownership would have been better than their CEO running wild; mobile development is a much safer place for indie devs with them bought out.
Branding is like, > 90% of business. Also a HUGE MASSIVE database of analytics and pre-loyal customers.
I'm not sure what I'd even put in the comment text, here. It seems kind of redundant.
Maybe I'm too naive, but this doesn't sound like it's solving the problem of "too many emails", but instead the problem of "users need a keyboard to respond to emails efficiently". If I can't escape the office, at least it would be nice to get away from the desk.
Never thought I'd see the day when someone on Slashdot would need to define BOFH.
I dunno, it's hardly false advertising to say "this policy isn't working for us, we're changing it going forward, but you can keep that extra storage for 12 months as compensation". Because that's what they're doing. Is it false advertising to ever change what plans you choose to offer?
Robots, or rather a human-driven learning program, can contribute facts to a shared database. Any robot based on this system can pull facts out of that database. Having "one robot teach another" seems like it implies that they don't share a database, and instead communicate information through some other way. This article is pretty neat because of its fact database, but not as cool as gorillas teaching each other sign language.
Pretty sure your browser's broken then, the BBC article has a video just above the text "Engineers in Bristol".
Information does want to be free, after all.
If it's not, at least there won't be anyone left to care.
That's surprisingly informative and sensible. Thank you!
I mean, of course if your store is getting broken into a lot, you should buy better locks. Doesn't mean that if there's a crime spree and a rash of of robberies you shouldn't call on the government to investigate or patrol more.
Suppose this applies to humans the same as mice. How long do you think it takes for the effects of stress to show up in RNA, and how long does it take for it to be cleared? Of course there's there's some delay because of sperm production, but I didn't see any other info about the time required in that abstract. (Probably makes sense that it would be a study of its own.)
Depending on how rapid the onset and falloff are, it might be pretty reasonable to say "yeah, that was a pretty bad couple weeks, let's put off trying for kids for a month".
They don't even seem different from stresses on humans. Most of those are things that a significant part of first-world humanity deals with on a daily basis.